Add donor Support for Paypal

[fkromer]

Would be nice to beeing able to payout contributors via https://www.paypal.com/de/webapps/mpp/paypal-me

[Ly0n]

We had many discussions about that and we removed Paypal from the Roadmap. We think that cryptocurrency better fits to the "Libre" idea, it has lower fees and you do not need a commercial account. The problem is that you will need something like a business to send money via the API. When you find a way to send money without the commercial account via the API that might be interesting again. One requirement would also be a transaction history API to create plots like these: https://github.com/protontypes/libreselery/wiki/Transaction-History This is related to this issue. https://github.com/protontypes/libreselery/issues/34

If enough users want that feature we could offer it for commercial usage.

[fkromer]

I did not know that. It makes total sense not to support PayPal.

[Ly0n]

@fkromer I was thinking if we could provide support for donors for Paypal. This would be very important, as it would significantly reduce the hurdle to donations. Many donors have no coinbase or cryptocurrency in general. LibreSelery already knows the email address that belongs to the Coinbase account. This is currently necessary to avoid giving donations to "yourself", as Coinbase does not allow this. Of course you could also put this email address on the donation website for possible Paypal donations. The problem is that the donations can only be forwarded manually. Messages from the transactions may also be lost and it may be very intransparent. I will try to check out what is be possible with the Coinbase / Paypal interaction.

[Ly0n]

I tested the creation of donation buttons. I do not think it is possible in an automated way to create them but here the results with some nice buttons. The button also has a "purpose"

Here the link to create them: https://www.paypal.com/donate/buttons

Another approach would be to create a PayPal Me button. Here we can only create one per user account. https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/my/profile

Both approaches still lack transparency but I still think we need PayPal support to simplify the donation process on the Donor side. We could tell the donor to create a unique identification note so that both parties are able to see that his donations was forwarded from the Paypal to the Coinbase Account on the "Thank You for Donation" list. The good news is that transferring money between Paypal and Coinbase is for free in US EU and UK:

https://help.coinbase.com/en/coinbase/getting-started/adding-a-payment-method/paypal-faq

@kikass13 @cornerman What is your opinion?

[kikass13]

@Ly0n @fkromer

i guess we have no choice but to add paypal ... the "fees" problem will probably pop up eventually in the next year: https://www.coindesk.com/eu-bloc-wide-regulatory-regime-crypto-economic-chief

The EU is playing hardball with crypto (which makes sense), which means that transferring money and donating something will be more strict and we coudl get legal problems in the long run.

[cornerman]

his donations was forwarded from the Paypal to the Coinbase Account

Not sure whether we should require people to wire all donations to coinbase. This will add unneeded fees when wanting to get it out of coinbase (normally via paypal again). Maybe we need some other way to store transactions for transparency - so we do not depend on coinbase for that.

[Ly0n]

So I will add this issue to the next milestone and we start with the Paypal support just for Donors not for the payout. thanks for the feedback @cornerman @kikass13.

[fkromer]

@Ly0n > I was thinking if we could provide support for donors for Paypal. This would be very important, as it would significantly reduce the hurdle to donations. Many donors have no coinbase or cryptocurrency in general.

Yepp. I fully agree.